Put your points here, stupid…

So, patch 3.3 has finally arrived. All I can say is that I think is great. The new instances and the new raid is really well done and the new dungeon finder kicks ass.

I’ve been able to accomplish a lot the past two days. One thing I haven’t accomplish though is making more money as I’ve been getting gear on my Shaman and Warrior that need enchants and gems. Yesterday my guild went into Icecrown Citadel and we managed to take a look at the four bosses that are in there at the moment.

The hardest boss feels like Lord Marrowgar since it demands that your tanks are well-coordinated with each other and that the rest of the raid are able to move out of fire and dps spikes when they appear. Healers will also have something do to all the time so there aint no time at all to slack. Every 1.5 seconds Marrowgar cleaves the two tanks for about 30k damage split between the two. From the first boss you can really feel the hard sting of the “Chill of the throne”-debuff which decreases your chance to dodge by 20%. For me personally I go from 28% down to 8 that is a lot.

After some tries though and getting our tactic correct we managed to bring him down. The second boss is Lady Deathwhisper and she was kind of weak. At the start of the fight, she puts up a mana shield which dps has to burn down while alternating to dpsing adds that spawn after that it’s a tank and spank fight really. She puts a debuff on tanks which decreases threat generated by 100% once it reaches five stacks when that happens you just switch tanks. I can’t really tell since I’m a tank but it feels like healing was much more intensive at the first boss.

We needed one try to figure out how the adds she spawned would act and at the second try she went down with no problems.

The third fight in the instance was really awesome. Mainly because everyone in the raid gets a couple of jetpacks to jump around with. ;)

This is the gunship battle, in which, as horde you are fighting the alliance gunship. You know, the ones that fly around in Icecrown. On this fight two people will man cannons which they use to nuke down the other ship while one group of people are fighting on the alliance ship and another group is fighting adds that spawn on our own ship. The tank that’s on the alliance ship will mainly tank the commander. He puts a buff on himself that increases damage so every once in a while the group on the alliance ship will have to jump back to the hordeship waiting for the buff to fall off. Every 25% of the alliance ships health a mob will spawn that freezes up the horde cannons this mob needs to be nuked down fairly fast so that the two people manning the cannons can keep dpsing the ship.

On the horde ship where I was stationed during the fight you just tank and nuke down adds that spawn on the ship with the help from Saurfang. Nothing really hard there. It took us about five tries I think before we got everything right.

The last fight in this wing is Saurfang’s son. This fight is basically about him generating blood points and is pretty much a dps race seeing as he gets more dangerous the more blood points he generates so the faster he dies the better. Hmm, I wonder which boss in any raid you can’t apply that logic to though. Anyway, he puts a debuff on one tank which makes him generate blood points every time he hits that tank so when the debuff is up, tank switch. He also has some AoE-damage which generates blood points which means people should not be standing to close to each other.

Adds will spawn during the fight which should be kited around and killed by range as fast as possible because if they hit anyone they will generate blood points for Saurfang. When Saurfangs pool of blood points reaches a 100. He will put a Mark of the Fallen champion on a random player in the raid which is basically a dot and blood point generator. This is why you wanna burn him down fast, because more marks means more stress on healing and more blood points which means more marks coming out faster.

We only had time for two tries on this encounter but I’m sure we will take him down on sunday.

So what do I think? Well, the fights was a whole lot of fun and had some really exciting mechanics. I don’t know about the gating though, for guilds that aren’t maybe as good as mine is it won’t probably matter. But if we clear the whole thing in one lookout and there’s no hard modes to try I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I don’t think that I will grow tired of this instance as fast as I did with Trial of the crusader anyways, since this one is so much more beautiful.

In fact, this is blizzard at it’s best. The only thing I have to complain about in this first wing was that the shipfight bugged, so when it was finished the ones that took care of the adds on the horde ship couldn’t leave it. And our Master looter couldn’t get to the loot which was on the horde ship but that will get fixed.

Sadly, I took no screenshots at all. So that will have to wait until next week.

Sometime during this weekend or next week I’ll have a post up about my opinions on the Dungeon Finder and the new 5-mans.

Hopefully, this week patch 3.3 will drop. If that does happen, i will probably start working on unlocking the 5-man instances for my Warrior and Shaman. It will probably be fun since me and my guildies now all have alts that like to stomp trough the heroics. Doing the quel’delar quest on both of them. Of course, if it drops on thursday my guild will enter the Icecrown Citadel and raise som hell. I’m looking forward to it, toc10 and ulduar has become pretty boring.

I’ve also been slacking with my goldmaking, sitting steadily at around 23-25,000 gold. Hopefully this week I’ll manage to reach 30,000 again. Ever since I leveled JC on my warrior I haven’t had the will to get up there, but this week I’m going for it. Yesterday I stocked up on about 1000 Ink of the sea hopefully, by the end of this week I’ve used up everything to make glyphs and that would also mean that I would have a lot of cash incoming for myself.

I haven’t really noticed any changes in the market though after my two week long absence. Right now it feels like we are about four or five people trying to make money off of glyphs and I think all of us is doing pretty good. One thing I’ve noticed in the last day or so though is that Icethorn prices are crashing hard, I don’t know why. But this morning I was able to get 37 stacks for the price of 12g/stack which is really a find. I mean I can sell snowfall inks for 13g so all the money I make from glyphs is pure profit.

I will keep you updated on the gold making and if 3.3 will drop I will also give you thoughts on the new 5 mans and the first part of ice crown citadel. I’m really excited about this patch.

When I started to play my enhancement Shaman for real about a week ago, I had a hard time knowing what kind of DPS I was able to put out in a heroic. Seening the DPS on recount just wouldn’t let me know if I did fine or bad DPS since I didn’t have any references.

I decided to test Enhsim, which I had heard a lot about to see what kind of dps I would be able to put out. So I fired up WoW to get my stats from Shock and Awe, which I then imported to enhsim. The result was as follows.

As you can see, my simulated dps would be 3037.47. This is under optimal conditions though, which would never ever work in the actual game since with a simulator you would have no response time for your rotation. I.e when Stormstrike is on cooldown the simulation will fire it off right away, with no latency. Where it would take a human atleast some time to react to the whole thing. Which is why it can be hard to trust this dps. But atleast you have something to go on, so with these numbers in mind I went to the lvl ?? training dummy in thunder bluff to see what numbers I actually could get.

As you can see here to the right. My recount shows 2930.1 damage per second which is about a 100 dps less than what the simulator gave us as a result. This is all fine though and you shouldn’t worry about it. Since as I said the simulator dont take into account latency and human responsetimes. What it shows us though is that the numbers from the simulator is fairly accurate and this is really good. Now we can play around in the simulator with different rotations and different buffs to see what would increase our dps and what would decrease it. Keep in mind though that beating on a training dummy is still dpsing in an optimal condition since there is no moving around no fire that will come from nowhere and try to kill you, no spells that needs interrupting and no stupid adds that will come along halfway trough the fight and fuck things up. But it still gives us a pretty good idea on what kind of dps we should be able to put out. This is also of course without any buffs from other players. But in enhsim you can easily add those buffs to see what kind of dps you would do along with for example a druid or paladin.

How do I import my stats from WoW into Enhsim?

This is really easy. Fire up World of Warcraft, press escape and click the interface button. Press the addon tab and find Shock and Awe. Click the image to the left to get a bigger picture. As you can see, there is a button that says, export to sim, press that one. And another small window will appear above your interface window.

This one is easy, just press ctrl + c when the window appears and you will have copied all the data you need for enhsim. Now, when that is done start up enhsim. In the column to your left you will see a big button which says “Copy from Clipboard” press that one and you’ve got your data from WoW into enhsim. Happy simulating everyone.

Here are a couple of more links about the simulator if you want to read more about it.

Big Hit Box, this is basically a blog for all DPS-classes, but Stoney, which is in charge of the enhancement department is one of the most active bloggers on that site and there is plenty of stuff to read if you’re new or old in the enhancement game.

I’ve been really trying to get my blogging going for a while. But I haven’t really had any idea what to write about. So I thought I would give you a rundown on what characters I’m currently playing and which I’m leveling up and what I plan on doing.

My main right now is a Protection Warrior, I’ve raided most content that’s available for 10 man with this one except Naxx and Malygos since I got it to 80 late in Wotlk. Been trying to tank Algalon and Anub HC with it but it feels like it’s struggling a little in the gear department for those encounters. Mainly a new shield is on the wish list, I’m hoping 3.3 will take care of that since Anub won’t drop the shield on normal.

The one character that has had most of my attention the last week though, is my Shaman, which is almost my oldest character, a priest is the oldest but he has retired since long ago. I really like the Shaman now when I get to play as enhancement I was mostly stuck healing with it trough TBC and that wasn’t really something I wanted to do with him in the first place. I’ve always liked melee more than casting and the enhancement playstyle really fits me well.

But don’t get me wrong I really enjoy healing, but resto shamans aren’t in the same place as they used to be back in TBC and I don’t really like how they work now for some reason. But since a lot of my friends av gone from pure dpsing to choosing hybrid classes there’s much more room for me to do other stuff than healing and tanking which I feel is a nice change of pace. I’m mainly gearing the shaman now through heroic and badge gear but we will see where it all ends up.

To fulfill my pvping needs, I have my Death Knight, which I also used to tank PvE-content in the beginning of Wotlk but tanking as a prot warrior is so much more fun. It’s lacking in gear since I don’t PvP a lot only the occasional BG now and then. Arena really isn’t for me. I’m much more fond of the large-scale war that Battlegrounds bring.

In the leveling department I have a rogue at level 75 which I plan to get to 80 at some point. My warlock and my hunter sits silently at level 71 and 73 and are now mainly used as bank characters. I have a druid at lvl 43 which I would really like to get up to level 80 to see how it is to tank with one.

So I’ve recently started gearing for enhancement on my little(?) Tauren Shaman and all I can say is that I really enjoy it. I’ve been mostly doing heroics with my friends and that’s okay because I really like doing heroics.

So I thought I’d share with you the tools I use to make the best of my shaman.

The first one is an addon that is called Shock and Awe. It’s basically a timer and priority addon. It let’s you set up a priority list for what spells you want to cast in what order and will show you with timers and a button when an ability comes off cooldown or if you forget to apply your flame shock when it runs out, it will remind you to do that.

It’s really handy in the beginning when you’re learning your rotation. Because, since level 60 the rotation has drastically changed, you no longer fire off a stormstrike then earthshock and wait for windfury to proc. The enhancement shaman is now a full-fledged melee caster which is what I love about the class.

Another nifty tool that we enhancement shamans have at our disposal is Enhsim. Which is basically a combat simulator. It lets you enter your stats, buffs and so on and then simulates combat for you to let you know where your dps should be around. It can be really overwhelming at the first look though since there is a whole lot of info for you to enter. Lucky for us, Stoney, the king of shaman-blogging(at least, I think so), has put up a post on Big Hit Box where he tells you what to do. So after you’ve downloaded it, you might wanna check that post out. Link is here.

Shock and Awe also has a function for exporting data into Enhsim, haven’t really tried that out though so I don’t know how well it works.

Well, since this seems to be all the rage these days. I figured I’d give my two cents. Well, if you’ve missed it, I’ll give you the quick rundown. Blizzard now, in there store has two non combat pets you can buy for 10$ each.

One of them is a Pandaren Brewmaster, which is awesome, cause he is a Panda, but he also likes to drink beer and unleash Kung Fu magic upon his foes. The other one is a mini-version of Kel’Thuzad, you know, the guy in Naxxramas that always insists on us kicking his ass.

There’s been quite the different reactions from people around the world. Saying that it’s wrong because some people wont be able to afford it etc etc.

Well, I was hoping that maybe blizzard would give us more utility instead of just non combat pets. This is nothing new in the world of item mall mmo’s but I think it would be nice if you could by flasks that would give you an EXP boost and stuff like that. I would probably spend my money on that since I’m a little bit of an altoholic. Non-combat pet feels like, meh? I don’t know, sure it would be cool to have a pandaren pet, but it’s not anywhere near how cool it would be to have actual Pandaren NPC’s in Azeroth.

Conclusion, more utility micro transactions! Not utility like screwing up the end game, but to help me level faster and stuff like that. Maybe heirloom items or something like that, since it wouldn’t be really gamebreaking if you couldn’t afford them.

So I’ve made a little guide for all you dps’ing warriors out there. Check it out!

I have decided to focus the blog more around world of warcraft instead of mmo’s in general since that’s mainly the game I play. Just so you know! It’s been slow posting the last month but I will try to get better.